1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for protecting commercial airliners from man portable missiles.
2. Background Art
There is a growing concern that terrorists will use shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles to shoot down commercial airliners. Many portable heat-seeking missiles are inexpensive, relatively easy to obtain on the black market and extremely dangerous. Afghan rebels used U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles to destroy Soviet jets and attack helicopters in the 1980s. Terrorists have recently tried to use older, Soviet-made SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles to bring down U.S. military aircraft in Saudi Arabia and an Israeli airliner in Kenya.
Neighborhoods or other areas where terrorists could hide and attack commercial jet airliners as they land or take off surround many of the world's civilian airports. Jets that routinely cruise at 500 mph or faster fly much more slowly near the ground. A Boeing 737 typically flies both take-off climb-out and landing approaches at 150-160 mph, for example. Even slow shoulder-fired missiles can fly almost 1,000 mph, more than fast enough to overtake a jet.
A heat-seeking missile operates much like a point-and-shoot camera. The operator aims at one of a plane's engines, which are heat sources, “locks on” the target for about six seconds, and fires. The missile has an infrared sensor that “sees” the aircraft's heat plume; a computer navigational system guides the weapon to an engine. A commercial pilot would almost never see a missile coming and could generally react only after the missile hit an engine or exploded nearby.
Certain US Air Force aircraft, such as C-17 cargo jets, have equipment to thwart attacks from portable heat-seeking missiles. It is known in the art to protect such aircraft by providing, on the aircraft, missile-detecting sensors coupled to a processor, which determines whether a missile is present, and flare and or chaff dispensers that explode flares or chaff to divert the missile away from the aircraft. However, the cost to install and maintain such equipment on many civilian aircraft would be very expensive, the missile detection algorithms are military sensitive knowledge, and it would be both unwise and unacceptable to install a pyrotechnic on a civilian aircraft.
Kirkpatrick (U.S. Pat. No. 6,738,012 B1) describes a sensor mounted on an airliner where this sensor provides raw data for processing at a ground station.
Zeineh (US Patent Application 20050062638) teaches that an incoming missile can be diverted by a towed retractable IR source.
There are roughly 5,000 commercial aircraft owned by U.S. carriers and 10,000 more in the rest of the world. There is a need to protect these commercial airliners from man portable missiles.